


what the fuck are perfect places anyway

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: written by the victors [4]
Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Hellenistic Religion & Lore, Original Work
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Burns, Disabled Character, Graphic Description, Implied Sexual Content, Multi, Pagan Gods, Polyamory, Retelling, Scars, giving characters back their agency
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-18 17:23:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18254408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: There is a contest, a battle of wills. Athena and Arachne, Apollo and Icarus, Medusa and Poseidon.They will say that it is hubris to challenge a god. They will call pride a fatal flaw, say that anyone who dares fight a god is destined to fail.They will say a lot. Very little of it will be true.Icarus falls, and Arachne weaves a net to catch him. Arachne is turned into a spider, and Medusa turns a goddess to stone. Medusa’s gaze turns mortals to stone, and Icarus uses his knowledge of anatomy to speak healing enchantments into her flesh after she gouges her own eyes out.Jealous gods take what they want, but they cannot stop the mending that comes afterward. They cannot stop the stubborn will of humans who love things to destruction, who would rather burn than run.





	what the fuck are perfect places anyway

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ShanaStoryteller](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShanaStoryteller/gifts), [tigriswolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigriswolf/gifts).



> Title is from "Perfect Places" by Lorde.

_Never regret thy fall,_

_O Icarus of the fearless flight_

_For the greatest tragedy of them all_

_Is never to feel the burning light._

 

You cannot challenge a god and expect to win.

To think otherwise is what they will call a mark of hubris, of excessive pride. _There is no equal to the gods,_ they all say.

(There are a great many things they will be wrong about.)

-

Arachne first meets Icarus in the marketplace under Hephaestus’ volcano. They quite literally run into each other, sending each other crashing to the ground.

“I’m so sorry,” Icarus rushes to apologize, helping pick up the woven goods that spilled out of her basket, but Arachne is too fascinated by the artistry of the small mechanical trinkets in Icarus’ hands.

“How did you make those goods?” she asks, and he smiles, grin as bright as the Apollo's chariot.

“If you have a moment, I can show you my spot at the forges.”

“For art?” Arachne says, “I’ve got plenty of time.”

-

They meet Medusa at the temple to Athena, where she is an apprentice priestess to the Pallas Athena, and the three of them quickly fall in love.

(After all, it's not hard to fall in love with two people as brilliant and passionate as yourself, people who love as quickly and as brightly as you do.)

While they are together, they do not make love. Medusa has sworn her body to the goddess until her apprenticeship is over, and she intends on keeping her promises to her mistress.

But she _does_ love Icarus and Arachne, beautiful and clever and prideful as they are. 

Icarus’ smile is soft and his hands permanently stained from work in his father's forges. Arachne's fingers are calloused from her loom and her eyes sharp and dark.

Medusa knows herself to be objectively beautiful- it is a well-known fact that all of the priestesses of Pallas Athena are beautiful maidens, offered by their town to the warrior goddess- but she hopes that Icarus and Arachne view her in the same intimate way she views them.

-

There is a contest, a battle of wills. Athena and Arachne, Apollo and Icarus, Medusa and Poseidon.

They will say that it is hubris to challenge a god. They will call pride a fatal flaw, say that anyone who dares fight a god is destined to fail.

They will say a lot. Very little of it will be true.

-

All three of them are brilliant, inventors and creators who see the world beyond the ways they've been taught to. Icarus crafts the newest of inventions. Arachne weaves the very stars into her tapestries. Medusa crafts healing songs that are used to heal heroes on the battlefields of Troy itself.

They are the best of the best, and they know that.

(But they are too prideful, and the gods won't allow that. It is blasphemy, after all, to consider your gifts to be the "best." Everyone knows that the gods are the best and that no human can compare.)

-

Icarus is the first to fall, the first to challenge the Gods and lose.

Icarus wants to craft a pair of wings so that he can fly, so that he can give Arachne and Medea the gift of flight. He is lured in by Apollo’s promises of new technology, of new ways to forge the intricate molds needed for wings.

His wax melts, burnt by the fervent heat of Apollo’s fire, and Icarus screams as he falls, skin burning with celestial fire. 

When Arachne’s net catches him, when Medusa finds him and tries to nurse him back to health with her healing songs, they find him with burns that cover his entire arm from shoulder blade down to the tips of his fingers. It’s almost unrecognizable as something even approaching human, a burnt lump of something that is closer to cinder than flesh. Part of his fingers are gone, replaced by blackened stumps cauterized roughly by the fire that destroyed his arm.

-

Icarus doesn’t want to burden them, but they don't care. 

“We still love you,” Medusa says, happy endings tucked in her smile as she kisses his burnt skin and whispers healing songs into his flesh.

“You are beautiful,” Arachne says, supernovas in her eyes as she teaches him how to make burnt, cracked fingers weave again.

-

They will say a lot about Arachne’s weaving skills.

They will say that a goblin turned thread into gold for her for the price of guessing its name, that she bargained her soul to the Devil in exchange for skills at the loom.

They will say a goddess bested her, turned her into a spider, the lowliest of artists.

They will say much. Very little of it will be true.

They will call her proud. And this- this will be the one true legend to her name.

-

Arachne beats Athena in a weaving match. Her tapestry gleams in jewel tones and golden threads, every stitch telling a story, a fairytale and a myth and a truth in one. It is clear to everyone in the room that her tapestry is worthy of the gods, and perhaps may be something even greater than that.

But she creates artwork that questions the gods, and that cannot go unpunished. She did not learn from Icarus’ mistakes, and thus, she is cursed. 

(Or maybe she _did_ learn something- that it is better to curse at thoughtless gods and face the consequences than to let gods push over you.)

So she is turned into a small bug, the lowest of crawling animals.

(In any other story, this would be the tragic ending. This would be her deserving punishment. But here, with her proud lovers who refuse to let her die, this isn't a tragedy. This is a triumph.)

When Icarus and Medusa realize what happened to Arachne, they don’t collapse into despair. They don't crumble in on themselves.

Instead, they put their minds together to find an answer, to bring their lover back in some way.

There is a Deep Magic for those with enough curiosity and desperation to know where to look. There are answers, powers, for the hungry, for those wronged and those desperate for answers.

Icarus has always been desperate for answers, and Medusa is all too willing to help him use them. Medusa combines Icarus' ancient spells with her healing songs, her strange, rasping voice lending power to enchantments of change and transformation.

Arachne does not become quite fully human again, but she regains much of her human form. She has a humanoid body, but her legs are too spindly and skeletal to hold her up, almost no muscle, and she ends up having to live in a wheeled chair designed by Icarus. Her eyes are flat, brown, and mirror-like, and she has mandibles curling around her teeth.

But none of this really matters. She can still weave from her chair, and she can still kiss her lovers, and that's all that matters.

-

Tragedy has an interesting meaning to those who live through the stories, the villains and victims in the legends. Sometimes tragedy does not spell sorrow or devastation but rather what happens after the story ends, when the hero goes off into a different story and the victims and villains are left to assemble their own lives from the wreckage of the hero's exploits.

-

“Please!” Medusa wants to scream, “Please stop!”

But Poseidon is a god, and Medusa knows what gods do. She knows what Athena did to Arachne, what Apollo did to Icarus. Gods are vengeful- that's what they warn you about.

Medusa bites her lip clear through in order to keep from screaming.

-

“Don’t look at me!” Medusa shouts, terrified for Arachne. The temple around her is littered with stone statues of the victims Poseidon and Athena brought to her, and she doesn't want her lover to join their ranks.

Arachne looks upon her, and she doesn't blink. Her dark insectoid eyes don't turn to stone. Instead, they turn sympathetic, as lovely as ever.

“I'm not entirely mortal anymore,” Arachne rasps, that voice Arachne hates keeping her safer than Medusa ever could. “Your curse does not affect me.”

She rolls her chair forward, offering her gnarled hand to Medusa. Medusa, who has not been able to look upon a living human in three months, takes it with shaking hands.

Arachne smiles, revealing the mandibles that curve around her human teeth. “Icarus misses you,” she says, and Medusa’s temporary relief disappears.

“He’s a mortal,” she says, horror in her voice. She can’t hurt Icarus. She can’t break the man they just barely managed to save from Apollo’s fire.

“Well, there are ways to stop the curse,” Arachne says, and Medusa sees the knife in Arachne’s curled fingers.

Medusa takes a deep breath. She knows the healing spells they learned when trying to figure out a way to turn Arachne back. She knows that they will be able to fix the damage she is about to do.

Sure, Arachne can see her without help, but Icarus can’t. And Medusa can’t risk him turning into stone as well. Arachne and Icarus are everything she cares about in this world, and if either of them dies, then she doesn't think she could take it. 

Medusa knows the value of sacrifice, of what one has to go through because of the wrath of the gods. She knows the punishments for in any way going against a god’s wishes.

“Give it to me,” she says, and holds out a hand for the knife.

(In this moment, she wishes for the celestial fire that burned away half of Icarus. It would be good to cauterize the wounds, to somewhat numb the agony she is about to put herself through.)

Arachne nods and hands her the blade.

-

Icarus falls, and Arachne weaves a net to catch him. Arachne is turned into a spider, and Medusa turns a goddess to stone. Medusa’s gaze turns mortals to stone, and Icarus uses his knowledge of anatomy to speak healing enchantments into her flesh after she gouges her own eyes out.

Jealous gods take what they want, but they cannot stop the mending that comes afterward. They cannot stop the stubborn will of humans who love things to destruction, who would rather burn than run.

-

Arachne spends years searching for a way to turn back into human form, to find her way back to her lovers, and when she manages to find a Deep Magic that can help her, it only turns her halfway back to normal. She ends up with spindly legs that can’t hold themselves up, insectoid mirrored eyes, and a crooked spine.

Icarus’s face is half burned off, his lips and cheeks and neck blackened and charred by Apollo’s wrath. His right arm is destroyed by celestial fire, and his left leg is half-replaced by a mechanical prosthesis.

Medusa gouges out her own eyes, too horrified at the prospect of turning her lover into stone. She ends up blind, unable to every see her lovers again, with horrifying scars. The lack of her powers does not keep her from turning others away; the snakes on her head deter any visitor.

-

The legends speak to their pride. They speak to their hubris, to their audacity to put themselves above the gods.

(The legends will not speak of how the reason they lost these contests was because of trickery and deceit, because of tricks of light and music and power.)

The legends never speak to the sheer force of will it takes to fix themselves, to bring themselves back to a state approaching sanity.

They’re prideful, there’s no doubt about that. It takes a certain amount of pride to argue with the gods, to declare their punishments unjust and seek to undo the damage.

The scars will never go away. Icarus’ body is covered in burn scars. Medusa’s eyes are replaced by hollows, deep gouges in her face. Arachne’s spindly legs can no longer hold her up.

But that doesn't matter to them.

-

Icarus presses kisses to Medusa’s lips and her snakes curl around his arms and caress his face, hissing blessings over his burned skin.

“I love you,” he says, kissing the scars where her eyes used to be. “You are beautiful.”

Medusa grins. “So are you, darling.”

“And so is your _other_ lover,” Arachne snarks from her spot in the corner of the room, where she sits in her chair weaving a new rug to trade with the merchants in town. Despite the near-permanently curled state of her fingers, she still is able to make some of the most beautiful tapestries and rugs in their region.

“Of course she is,” Icarus says, offering Arachne a smile.

-

“They call us monsters,” Medusa says, a smile to her voice when she returns from the marketplace, “They call us Gorgons, talk of us as the three monsters who haunt this temple.”

“Let them,” Icarus says, looking up from his inventor’s table. “They don’t matter. As long as we have each other, no opinions matter but the three of ours.”

They are scarred, but they are not broken.

-

Someday their individual names and stories will be forgotten, leaving behind only tales of monsters and failures. They will become fables to warn children with, the monsters that will live in closets and under beds.

"They say the Gorgons once lived there," they will say one day, over the place where Medusa, Icarus, and Arachne lived and loved and died, and they will be speaking of monsters, not lovers.

The sands of time will erase everything that they hold dear, but in this moment, the immortality of their names does not matter. All they care about is spending time together, being in love, staying together and being happy.

The gods may be able to control the legend, but they cannot change the truth behind the story itself.


End file.
